A few different stray things on the internet had been
floating around in my mind for a while. Maybe it was noticing that most of the
sf critics don't seem to have that big old chip on the shoulder anymore; it has
been a while since I've seen any of them hurl "Yeah, well our books have
characterization too, so there!" at mainstream or literary critics who
have been ignoring them.
Maybe it was a note from a friend, a longtime science
fiction fan, who was rejoicing in the fact that his Miss Popularity daughter
and her friends were campaigning to have their prom have a Tolkien theme.
Or another note from a friend exulting in how much cooler he
is, now, than the people who were crappy to him in high school.
Might have been the interesting diversity of responses to Losers in Space (good
sampling at the Goodreads
page, and in the
editorial reviews in the Barnes and Noble page), which prompted me to drop
a note to Sharyn saying "You know, I think the acceleration
of mud may be the toilet
repair of this book." (She sent back an appropriate snarf. Sharyn and
I play well together).
Some of it was the conversation I'm about to report below.
The one that crystallized it for me, though, just yesterday,
was Max
Castera's piece, "Why Do Kids Prefer Sci Fi over Science?" in Wired's GeekDad section.
Crystallized may be the wrong metaphor. More like finding a
perfect piece of backing for a quilt, or perhaps a perfect brain in a jar (the one from Abby Somebody).
Castera's piece let me sew together a bunch of stray snippets I'd written,
without having them add up or go anywhere, across the last year, plus the
thoughts occasioned above, into a sort of a Frankenstein of a blog post, which
this is. I still don't know that I myself understand it (mostly it seems to be
just going "Ruuuuggggggh!"), and it's kind of an ugly son of gun, but
maybe it'll rile some peasants.
About that conversation: So there I was, sitting in a
bookstore coffee shop, recharging my caffeine stream and the computer's
battery, when I overheard, "Einstein like totally proved that how you
experience time depends on your emotions. That's just physics."
I don't know how other novelists work, but eavesdropping is
part of the job for me—actually a vital part. It's essential to avoiding having
characters talk like people in other books.* So when I hear something, I start
spying.
In this case, the person speaking was dressed like she was
going to a costume party as a hipster geek, and I was reminded again that hip
geeks and geekish hipsters had sort of sneaked up on me over the last couple
decades, and that for many people under age thirty-five or so, there was never
a time when geekiness wasn't cool or fashionable.
Then her coworker said. "I love physics. I mean,
quantum physics. Of course I hate classical physics cause its like industry and
killing the Earth** and all."
And the third coworker, a male who looked twice as hip and
three times as geek as the other two put together, chimed in with the opinion
that quantum physics, which Einstein had "invented" because he was
"totally a mystic and a pacifist," meant that "things can be
whatever we want them to be so, you know, observer created reality*** we're
totally free." And it went downhill from there.****
All three had the mix of clothing and personal style that is
somewhere right on the cusp between the cool crowd at a science fiction
convention and the local coffeehouse intellectuals, and I was driven to a
melancholy realization:
Geeks were never, on the whole, particularly smart.
Even when I was but a wee tad, and there were old geeks even
then, the gray-haired geeks I met were often just people with good heads for
trivia; an obsession with some less-visited and less-respected aspect of pop
culture like vampires, superheroes, flying saucers, etc.; chips on their
shoulders about people who were more socially capable, economically successful,
or genuinely educated than themselves; and personas encrusted with odd
affectations that were some mixture of defensiveness, attempts to be
interesting, and genuine eccentricity.
What geeks were, which was very important and did matter
very much to smart people, was other-geek-tolerant in a way that opened
up room for other people to be smart.
The guy sitting next to you in the propeller beanie who knew the casts (and their careers) of everyone who was ever in a Universal horror movie, or the current positions of all the planets, or all of Monty Python by heart, was often not particularly more gifted intellectually than the teenage girl who could name every backup singer in thirty bands, or the White Sox fan who could tell you all of the last twenty seasons inning by inning, or the car enthusiast who instantly recognized the make, model, and year of every car that went by.
But unlike his or her mundane-hobbyist counterparts, the
real geek liked to think that when he or
she was sitting on a couch, drinking something sane people would avoid after
they could drink legally, he was hanging out with a genius. With a fellow-genius. Ideally with a fellow slan-level uber-genius.
Better yet, the two of them could pretend that they were both sitting next to a fellow etcetera. And if one of
them really was smart, bingo,
home free, and hurray, there was a friendly place for a brainy person – and
such places were (and still are) scarce in our culture. The shy, awkward
mathematician who was seeing deeper into the nature of reality than anyone else
within a 100-mile radius could feel like somebody liked him for the genius he
really was, even if the person appreciating him was just a guy who knew a lot
about Green Lantern.
But things move on.
Some of that light leavening of the really talented among
the geeks grew older, got jobs in the entertainment industry, and made their
dreams, and it turned out they were right all along: this shit was cool. People who used to duct-tape That Poor Hopeless Dork
naked and upside down in the girl's locker room were standing in line on Dec.
17 desperately hoping to get a plastic toy from the TPHDverse so as not to ruin
their kid's childhood (and were perhaps troubled, in the secret moments before
they fell asleep, to be aware that when they said "I knew TPHD in high
school, but we were never friends," their kids looked at them with
deploring, condescending pity, thinking of course not, you couldn't
possibly have been cool enough).
Geekiness became mainstream, and like all mainstream stuff
then fragmented (a mainstream is a stream so big that it has room for plenty of
turbulence). The consumer-culture toys-and-props side of geek culture grew a
hip wing of people who like the same crap but like it ironically so don't lump me in with the lumps!
And smartness went from being tolerated to being assumed to
... well. To I geek therefore I'm smart. To .... let me show you.
Meanwhile back at the eavesdropping, an older guy who
dressed like me (so you may trust me, nothing remotely hip was happening in his
vicinity; mothers sometimes point me out to their children and say "See
what happens if some people are allowed to dress themselves?") took a seat
at the counter, and after a while, it turned out that being a high school
physics teacher, and perhaps dealing with New Age
"Quantum=Abracadabra!" equation in his classroom too often, he
endeavored to correct some of the happy babble of the baristas. They told him
that he needed to loosen up and get out of all this math stuff or he'd never
understand quantum physics, and after he gave up, went off into a discussion of
The Watchmen and of why Neil Gaiman's
being on The Simpsons was cool,
and I'm very happy to say that I can find no way to attribute one iota of what
was in these people's heads (or not there, more properly) to Alan Moore, Neil
Gaiman, or Matt Groening.
After he left, their conversation morphed over to People Who
Just Don't Get It, by which they meant not so much that guy who thought he knew
physics but had probably never even heard of Deepak Chopra, as much as they meant their parents and some of their
employers and teachers, who, like, never ever heard of or even thought about
this stuff, so they were like, so cut off, so out of it. I noted that at least
for these three little hipster geeks, the Clark Kent glasses, engine-part
earrings, sleeved up tats and too-cool 'tude have become their ironclad
evidence that despite knowing very little, and being unable to think coherently
or cogently about the little they know, they are very comfortable with being
brainitude-infested uber smart innalexshuls, to pronounce it as they tended
to.***** Smartness consisted of what you bought and how you consumed it, of
liking the right products and rejecting everything that didn't fit. They were
smart because they were geeks and they were geeks because they were
fashion-slaves to geekish peer pressure, not just in products but also in
beliefs and ideas and pritnear the whole works.
And a pleasant thought overwhelmed me.
The geeks of a few generations ago, the true paleogeeks, the
ones who made geekdom a safe hangout for brains in a world full of bullies,
trendies, and trendy bullies, the geeks who were not always likeable or
personable but still occupied the most interesting table at lunchtime – those
geeks would not have been able to stand these guys behind the counter. (Heck, I
would guess many of the geeks of today can't). In fact there was a good chance
that that high school physics teacher, who looked like he was competing with me
in the final round of Can You Be Mistaken for a Basket of Laundry?, was a genuine old-school real-thing geek, a Geek of
Old, if you will.
And the pleasant thought was this: people just like the
Geeks of Old are still being born. They are still being badly socialized and
squeezed to the outside of school and family and peer groups. They are still
growing up into a world that has very little place for them.
In fact, for the moment, the world has less place for the
Geeks of Old than it did during Old, because what used to be their place
has been overrun with trendy dipshits. Really, it's not even a new sort of social disaster; it's
what happened to the hippies for a while, and to the preppies, and might happen
to any other broad clique or lifestyle at any moment: the people who want to
get what you've got without accepting what you have are essentially a ravening
horde of peer-driven fashion-enforcers, and at the moment they've ravened their
way into geekdom, but
1)
they won't stay, because they never stay anywhere, and
2)
when they go, they'll have destroyed a lot of bullshit,
because it is exactly the bullshit to which they are attracted, and they'll
discredit it for generations of geeks yet to come.
Right now, out there, some kid with hardly any friends is
muttering to him or herself, "Vampires and zombies are stupid. Space ships
and aliens are bullshit. Movies that are all flashing lights and loud noises
and based on toys are dumb, and besides there's no explosions in space and that
time machine doesn't make any sense and computers can't blow up from typing
unacceptable commands any more than paper catches fire when you write bad
things on it, and not to mention that a guy who spends all his time running and
yelling and shooting would not have any idea how to fix a toaster, let alone a
space-time continuumoscopic defenestrator. I am not going to go to the party dressed
as a wizard, I am not going to stand in line till midnight to be the first to see
SOUND AND FURY: The Tale Told By An Idiot, Part 7, and I am going to stay right
here and..."
"... and ..."
And?
There's the beauty!
I don't know and you don't know what that kid is staying
home reading/watching/playing instead.
But we live in the world of teh interwebz, and no matter
what s/he likes, or is looking for, soon that outcast kid will find another
person who has no desire to be a wizard and thinks that Japanese artists may
have been snorting a little too hard on the panties from the vending machines
and should at least learn to draw people with smaller eyes.
I can't seem to find it online, but decades ago, reading one
of Those Magazines That No, Really, I Mean It, I Read It For the Fiction, I
encountered a marvelous cartoon: an immense orgy with naked people of all
genders in all possible configurations in one vast sprawl, except for a young woman
in a somewhat dowdy dress and a young man in a rumpled suit and tie, standing
in the middle of the only clear space in that humping, rutting mob. They had
eyes only for each other, and one of them was saying, "Really? I like classical music too!"
I wish I could find it because it illustrates exactly my
point: that when the genuinely different – not the affectedly set-apart – find
each other and discover that they are not the only ones in the world like
themselves, the angels sing a capella Bach in heaven. Or perhaps hold a
Dixieland parade or a hootenanny or do a kazoo performance of the 1812
Overture. You just never can tell with those angels, they're fun-loving
bastards who don't care what's cool. And if that's not what angels are like I'm
playing for the other team from now on.
Anyway, only slightly more seriously: this is a big reason
why the indie/self-pub revolution is so incredibly wonderful, and why I envy
younger writers who won't spend as many years in traditional/legacy publishing.
Because there is going to be more and odder odd stuff out there to be found.
Because people who like really-smart and demanding-smart more than glib-smart
or fashion-smart or
of-course-I'm-smart-all-my-friends-are-rich-and-we-all-agree-we-are will be
able to find things they like, and through those things, find each other, and
the bullying ninny ex-geek in the corner office in New York or LA won't be able
to keep them from it.
One reason why As You Like It is still my favorite Shakespeare comedy is this: nearly everyone you
see on the stage has realized that the wicked usurper seizing power in the
capital is a perfect excuse for all the fun people to run off to the Forest of
Arden, put on men's clothes if they don't wear them already, and have fun
adventures for their own sake for the next four acts (and then abruptly marry
each other because, shucks, it's a comedy, everybody likes a wedding at the end
of a comedy).
Well, folks, I am here to tell you: the towers of geekdom
are fallen to the hands of the trendroids. The cool people have seized the
citadel. Usurper fashionistas sit upon the thrones of glory in Castle Geek, and
true geeks creep out the back gate at night, unnoticed, unpursued, unmourned.
We are once again exiles
.... in the Forest of Arden! ...
so put on your favorite role and maybe a nice men's
outfit******, and join me in hanging up handbills filled with excruciating
poetry all over the woods (I intend to hang up Emily Dickinson's "I'm
nobody! Who are you?" on any tree that has private property post no bills
on it, and maybe tape it to some
ultra-serious culture-critic's back when he's not looking).
With the handbills we invite all the new people (that lost
kid reading Coleridge in the corner of the library at lunch, the girl who can't
tell anyone why she visits all those 19th century fashion plate websites every
night, the kid who likes math because of the taste of seven and the ringing
tones of primes) to all the new parties. It's gonna be fun out here, away from
the usurpers. If it ever gets dull, we can hold a wedding and go sack the
castle back.
§
*I don't try to avoid having characters talk like people in
books. They should talk like people in
books. They are people in books. They
just shouldn't talk like people in other books, unless I'm deliberately
imitating the other books. Having people talk like people in other books just
because that's how you happen to write them is lazy, misses too many
opportunities to do something interesting, and is probably a symptom of not
having anything to say (possibly because you read too much to do anything
interesting).
**actually she said something more like "kiln thuh
earthen awl?" But I immediately realized she was not asking questions about
making ceramic woodcarver's tools. Such are the benefits of theatre training in
accents and dialects.
***pronounced "azerva crated ree-yatty." Okay,
I'll stop now.
****If you don't see anything wrong with any of what they
were saying, go away quickly, because I am a bad person and I will hurt you
just for fun. Or at least you'll never
be able to figure out any other reasons for what I did.
*****Oops. I guess that
was the last time, then.
****** or whatever you like, Dr. Furter. Wouldn't want to
spoil the party for anyone.
